of miles in skin-covered kayaks that the Russians called baidarkas. Early visitors marveled at the seaworthiness and sheer grace of these boats, which Aleut boys learned to make and maneuver from the age of six or seven. “If perfect symmetry, smoothness, and proportion constitute beauty, they are beautiful,” wrote 18th-century traveler Martin Sauer. Russian naval officer Gavriil Davydov observed, “The one-man Aleut baidarka is so narrow and light that hardly anyone else would dare to put to sea in them, although the Aleuts fear no storm when in them.”
Aleuts made their boats watertight by fastening their gutskin parkas to the gunwales of their vessels—a method still used by modern kayakers. Their quarry were Steller’s sea lions, seals, sea otters, the now-extinct Steller’s sea cow, and (using poisoned harpoon points) small whales. And they harvested salmon, halibut, and other marine life.
Aleut hunter with bentwood visor. Drawing by John Webber, 1778.
Ironically, the hunters’ prowess worked to their disadvantage after Russian discovery. Siberian fur traders used them as forced labor to do their hunting for them, holding their families hostage. Aleut warriors resisted, but arrows and amulets couldn’t prevail against firearms. The three-hatch baidarka was devised to enhance control over the hunters: an armed Russian overseer occupied the lead kayak’s middle seat in every hunting party. By the 1830s, Aleut paddlers—aided by transport on ships—traveled as far afield as California in relentless pursuit of the sea otter. Some hunters were also resettled north to the Pribilof Islands to harvest fur seals for their Russian overlords.
INUA: THE ESKIMO WORLD
Eskimos of the Gulf of Kotzebue. Drawing by Louis Choris, 1816–17.
Eskimos, the last of Alaska’s Native people to migrate from Siberia, belong to a hunting culture spanning the Arctic from Siberia to Greenland. They occupy, in fact, the largest geographical expanse of any of the earth’s cultures. The name “Eskimo” evokes many stereotypes—ice-hewn igloos, for instance, sometimes built by Greenlanders and the Canadian Inuit but not (except in traveling emergencies) by Alaska Natives. In truth, the term encompasses diverse ways of life reflecting the different conditions under which Eskimos live. Alaska’s Eskimos belong to two distinct language groups. Above the northern shore of Norton Sound live the Iñupiat; south of that line Yup’ik is spoken, from the sprawling Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta down to Bristol Bay and the Alaska Peninsula. A small, distinct subgroup known as Siberian Yupik—walrus and whale hunters with kinship ties to Russian Natives—live mainly on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. These Eskimo subcultures share many customs yet are different in important ways.
The Iñupiat people of the High Arctic live half the year or more under dark and frigid conditions, yet have evolved a hunting and whaling culture suited to their daunting environment. The Yup’ik Eskimos live in a less severe, subarctic setting, rich in sea mammals, salmon, waterfowl, and herds of inland caribou.
The early Eskimos’ weapons and hunting kit, fashioned from bone, ivory, and driftwood and engraved with magic images, reflected their belief that animals wish to be killed by beautiful tools. Despite the stark appearance of their world—the treeless landscape and icy waters—resources were plentiful to the practiced eye. Roaming inland—also home to Athabascan Indians with whom they traded and often warred—they took caribou, bear, and other land animals. In the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, the Yup’ik established many inland settlements.
Men fished, hunted waterfowl, and harpooned seals from slender kayaks. Wider beamed umiaks—open-hulled vessels covered in walrus hide—carried hunting parties in pursuit of whales and ivory-tusked walrus. An Eskimo specialty, especially among the Iñupiat, whale hunting required high levels of community planning and sharing. Membership in a whaling crew brought special honor and, following a successful hunt, the meat was divided among all members of the community.
Winter’s enforced leisure produced a rich ceremonial life, centered in the qasgiq (men’s house), an earthen and driftwood bath-house and hunter’s lodge that doubled as a meeting place for community rituals. In the Eskimo world, humans, animals, and even stones have an inner soul, or inua, with the power to transform into other life forms. A man might become a seal, or a walrus a man. A dead creature’s spirit remained alive in the bladder, carefully preserved by the hunter until—in the bladder festival—it was returned to the sea to be reborn in another animal.
Whalers invaded west Alaskan waters in the 1840s; traders brought firearms, liquor, illness, and the cash economy; and gold was found at Nome in 1898. By the turn of the century, each sizable settlement included a modern school and white schoolmaster. Today, the old ways survive, but the modern hunter prefers the snowmobile and outboard engine to the sled or kayak. Yet the spirit world remains a powerful force for traditional Eskimos, and endures in their graceful bone and ivory carvings, wooden masks, and other Native arts.
ALASKA’S ATHABASCAN PEOPLE
Athabascan man of Fort Yukon. Photo by E.W. Nelson, about 1877.
Alaska’s Athabascan Natives, scattered mainly across the Interior, occupy a vast homeland that also extends south to Cook Inlet’s shores, part of the Kenai Peninsula, and eastward to the Copper River basin and Canada. Bows and arrows for hunting, snowshoes, fringed and beaded moose and caribou hide clothing, and canoes and utensils made of birch bark were hallmarks of their traditional culture. Athabascans are divided into various regional groups—the Tanaina of Cook Inlet, the Tanana and Koyukon of the central Interior, and the Ahtna of the Copper River country, for instance. (The Eyak, a small group related to Athabascans but influenced by Tlingit culture, live in the Copper River delta.) Their diverse languages, part of the same broad Na-Dene speech group, belong to the same language family as the Southwest’s Navajo and Apache. Mainly nomadic, Athabascan hunters and trappers followed moose, caribou, and other mammals of the taiga steppe, muskeg flats, and conifer and birch forests lying north of the coastal mountains. Along major rivers and tributaries, they lived a seminomadic life, setting up summer fish camps to harvest the rich salmon runs swimming upriver from the sea.
Spartan survivalists habituated to Alaska’s severe Interior winters, Athabascan peoples were known for exceptional strength, resourcefulness, and stamina. They traveled light in small groups, on a moment’s notice, following the migration paths of their game. Their caches, elevated log boxes to store food and gear, are icons of wild Alaska. In summer they lived in easily collapsible bark houses, and in winter built semi-underground dwellings or used domed lodges of moose or caribou hide. Caribou were as important to Alaska’s Athabascans as bison were to southern Plains Indians, and their hunting methods were highly efficient. In autumn, herds were driven into staked barriers equipped with snares, or funneled into corrals where 20 hunters could kill hundreds of animals—several months’ supply of food, skins, horn, and bones.
When Russian agents established an Interior fur trade in southwest Alaska in the 1820s and 1830s, many Athabascans of the region became contract trappers employed by the Russian-American Company. It was an entrepreneurial way of life for which their traditions of mobility and solitary hardiness prepared them well.
In the enforced leisure of winter, they held potlatches—ceremonial feasts to mark important events such as deaths, births, and marriages.
For Athabascans, as for other Alaska Natives, all creation was a spirit realm in which the human and non-human were one. Elaborate rituals and taboos governed the use of nature’s resources. There was a formalized reverence for the earth and its life forms. Nature in the Interior was less generous than along the coast; resources were
